CHANTAL + PINA BAUSCH

un jour Pina m'a demandé
CHANTAL AKERMAN (1983)


1/6 - versão italiana

BALKAN BAROQUE :

Balkan Baroque
PIERRE COULIBEUF (1999)

com
MARINA ABRAMOVIC








VER AQUI!


BALKAN BAROQUE: SYNOPSIS

Experimental fiction. The autobiography, both real and imaginary, of Marina Abramovic, Body Art artist. The film composes the life aesthetic of a woman in her era, with a personal history strongly marked by the Yugoslavia of Tito, everyday violence, the experience of physical and psychic limits... The voluntary evocation of the past makes something more secret, more intimate crop up: an unknown evolution that is embodied in fictions felt like authentic fragments of truth. Balkan Baroque jumps from one identity to another, from a true story to an imagination, from a dream to a ritual... - the language of the body often taking over from the word, interrupting it or, on the contrary, stimulating it.

(All the images in the film are original, whether inspired by performances or purely imaginary).


STATEMENT

Here and now

In the film Balkan Baroque, one has the impression that the character invents the past as she speaks, here and now. This past seems to have no reality outside the moment it is evoked with the force that is characteristic of film work. Here, in Balkan Baroque, it has become the present, the present of the film unwinding before the viewer's eyes.

What we see on the screen is in the process of happening-it is the very gesture that is given to us and not a report on it. The universe of the film is given in a perpetual present. In other words, this biography of Marina Abramovic, which implies a number of past things, is in process of unfolding before our eyes, here and now, as we watch Balkan Baroque. 'Elsewhere' and 'formerly' do not exist. There is no longer a true reality, inherent and external to the film, so there is no longer anything but the sole reality of the projected images. The film, the universe that it reveals, suffices by itself, at every instant, erasing itself as it goes along, within a loop that is literally never-ending.

We are therefore dealing with a subjective, mental unwinding. The work Balkan Baroque is not account of an exterior reality; it is its own reality. The only time to be considered for this biography is the projection time (63'). Balkan Baroque is pure fiction, an imaginary production in which Marina Abramovic plays different roles, including the role of the artist doing performances.


CONCEPTS

Balkan Baroque is guided by several principles: discontinuity (black and white as structuring elements); ritualisation and frontality; fiction (and not the documentary). The black of memory, from which arise the white images of the past (the artistic rituals). The images from memory are combined with fancies, fantasies and dreamlike waking images, as well as rituals of life (the kitchen, the dining room, the gymnasium...). The discontinuity of memory, which blends images from the past with imaginations, life rituals with artistic rituals. Depending on its visual component, the film becomes the equivalent of an 'involuntary memory', with its breaks, its oversights, its absence of chronology. Thus, one can consider the film of the image and the film of the chronological, narrative voice. (Thanks to the form of statement, the narrative voice gives rise to other images in the spectator's mind.) The visual and sound components are autonomous and constitute the audio-visual image. But the visual image and the sound image communicate with each other in an underground manner, with numerous effects of resonance.
The performances are adapted - in other words, transformed by the cinematic point of view (the shot imposes its law; Marina Abramovic becomes an actress). In the film, they take on a mental appearance, like memory-images or insistent, shimmering images that suddenly force their way through, climb as far as awareness and dilate the present.

Balkan Baroque creates a character whose identity is multifaceted and continually inventing itself. In this sense, the film creates its own reality, standing 'on the borderline' between real and imaginary, without one's truly knowing what is real and what is ima-ginary. Thanks to this distance, this interval, Marina Abramovic appears behind multiple masks. The film scoffs at representation and scrambles the codes.

NYC SIXTIES AVANT-GARDE :

Among my favourite...beauty and excitement..
Jonas Mekas



PEYOTE QUEEN
STORM DE HIRSCH (1965)





WATCH HERE

Parabéns, John!

Happy Birthday John!
JONAS MEKAS (1972)


From UbuWeb:
"16 mm film, 24 min

October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono's art, designed by the Father of Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art (curated by David Ross, presently director of the Whitney Museum). Same day an unusual group of John's and Yoko's friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg and many others gathered to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event.

We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by John, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and their friends,--not a clean studio recording, but as a birthday singing, free and happy. This is the only recording of that event.

There are other images that are included in the film that develops like a "music video": the John & Yoko party at Klein's /their agent/ June 12, 1971; August 1972 at the Madison Square Garden; the Central Park Vigil on the day John was shot; and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko.

The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the Birthday Party singing, contains John's comments on his own film-making, his "home movies" he did on 8mm. The most catchy song, sung in an improvised manner, in the film, is the Attica Blues. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujolaitis."

A importância

de
Robert Kramer

ICE - 1969

ver excerto de 20min aqui


One of American independent Robert Kramer’s strongest “underground” features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Alphaville and including even THX 1138, it was set in the future mainly as a ruse for critiquing the present.) Now as then, the power of this creepy movie rests largely in its dead-on critique of the paranoia and internecine battles that characterized revolutionary politics during the 60s; the mood is terrorized and often brutal, but the behavioral observations and some of the tenderness periodically call to mind early Cassavetes. A searing, unnerving history lesson, it’s an American counterpart to some of Jacques Rivette’s conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

PAUVRE PIERROT.

Pauvre Pierrot
Emile Reynaud (1892)

PAUL VECCHIALI.

Luc Moullet sur Paul Vecchiali

l y a chez Paul Vecchiali un côté vieille France. Ce polytechnicien a toujours géré ses maisons de production (Les Films de Gion, Unité trois, Diagonale) en bon père de famille, avec amour, rigueur et minutie, comme Truffaut, Rohmer, Tavernier, Varda ou moi, à l’opposé du plus grand nombre, qui ne craint pas les paris aventureux ou les risques de faillite. Ce traditionalisme à tous crins est quelque peu contredit par un regard humain et généreux sur le monde des homosexuels.

Le côté réactionnaire, droitier, voire pot-au-feu se traduit notamment par une grande attention envers la famille, les parents. Sur ce plan, je ne vois que Tavernier qui puisse lui être comparé (Daddy nostalgie, L’horloger de Saint-Paul), avec cette différence importante que Tavernier se situe dans un horizon politique tout à fait opposé.

Vecchiali est, je crois, le seul cinéaste au monde qui ait consacré un film à sa mère (En haut des marches) et un autre à son père (Maladie). Les deux sont d’ailleurs judicieusement couplés sur le même disque du beau coffret consacré à Vecchiali par Antiprod. Un traitement inégal en apparence, puisque le premier est un long métrage de fiction et le second un court métrage documentaire, mais ce dernier a l’avantage d’une plus grande rigueur, d’un pouvoir émotionnel et artistique plus affirmé.

Voici une orientation artistique insolite par rapport au contexte culturel national (le “Famille, je vous hais” de Gide) et par rapport à notre cinéma, qui a plutôt tendance à montrer la fracture entre les générations (Truffaut, Chabrol, Becker, Pialat) ou à omettre la génération d’avant (Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, Resnais).

Paul Vecchiali, dix-huit ans après le décès de son père Charles, a retrouvé son journal, qui relate l’évolution de sa maladie depuis 1952 jusqu’à sa disparition en 1959.

Il a donc filmé ce journal tenu sur un carnet. Les indications qu’il contient sont succinctes, précises. Elles ont une rigueur quasi militaire(1). Le défunt était d’ailleurs capitaine. Et l’émotion surgit de ce contraste entre la sécheresse du texte filmé, accentué par le ton neutre du récitant, et tout ce qu’il contient de dramatique. On a vraiment l’impression d’un mal inexpugnable (nous sommes prévenus dès le début de l’issue fatale) qui progresse sans trêve malgré de courtes accalmies. Tout commence par des crises d’asthme, qui semblent avoir entraîné des affections bien plus graves, puisque le capitaine Vecchiali allait mourir d’un cancer. À moins qu’il y ait eu concomitance fortuite.

Le texte est lu, avec quelques retouches, par Paul Vecchiali, d’une façon assez bressonienne. On pense d’ailleurs au redoublement écrit/voix du Journal d’un curé de campagne. Le spectateur lit plus vite l’écrit que le récitant. Ce qui fait que, souvent, pour garder le dyssynchronisme, Vecchiali commence à lire la quatrième ou la cinquième ligne du texte. Le spectateur doit alors faire un effort pour essayer de retrouver sur le cahier le texte qu’il vient d’entendre. Ce qui augmente sa participation au film.

Vers la fin, l’écriture, fort lisible jusque-là, devient brisée, maladroite. Aiguillés par quelques effets de métamorphose faciale dus à la maladie, que révèle un montage cut saisissant, nous prenons conscience de ce que Charles approche de sa fin, ce dont il se rend bien compte lui-même. Paul Vecchiali ajoute que son père relate son dialogue avec Dieu (il prétend l’avoir entendu), qu’il identifiait la vie à un passage, et que l’éternité constituait la vraie vie.

On retrouve ici l’itinérance des fins de vie. Charles Vecchiali erre de Toulon à La Roquebrussanne, au Luc et à Montpellier: les personnes très malades sont sans cesse à la vaine recherche – souvent contradictoire – d’un lieu, ou d’un hôpital où elles pourraient se trouver mieux…

Le mimétisme entre Charles et Paul demeure saisissant. La moustache commune y est pour beaucoup. Les photos de la famille sont en noir et blanc, tout comme une image de Paul, une photo semble-t-il. Mais soudain, elle s’anime(2). Il a voulu un moment se situer sur le même plan que son père. On croit un instant voir les doigts de Charles, mais ce sont ceux de Paul. Et en plus, Paul parle à la première personne en lieu et place du père, comme s’il voulait prolonger son existence.

Cela surprend dans l’œuvre de Vecchiali, où les protagonistes sont plutôt féminins, maternels (rien que des femmes dans Femmes femmes, Danielle Darrieux dans En haut des marches(3)).

Nous trouvons donc, pour l’essentiel, des plans en couleurs de Paul Vecchiali qui parle, des plans sur des photos de famille en noir et blanc et des plans sur le carnet, avec parfois, comme en surimpression, certaines photos. Mais il ne s’agit probablement pas de surimpressions: cela eut coûté trop cher par rapport à l’économie du film. Ce sont des jeux de miroirs qui renvoient l’image de la photo, quelque peu évanescente, sur les pages du carnet.

Maladie est en fait un no budget film. Vecchiali prétend l’avoir tourné en deux heures. Ce qui me vexe: j’ai passé plus de temps à rédiger ce texte. Nous avons ici la preuve qu’on peut réussir des chefs-d’œuvre touchants, émouvants comme Maladie, avec rien. C’est Maladie qui m’a incité à tourner à nouveau des courts métrages chaque fois que j’en avais envie. En 1978, les réalisateurs de longs métrages se sentaient dévalués s’ils revenaient au court métrage.

Voici, je crois bien, la première fois qu’un cinéaste consacre tout ou partie de son film à sa maladie (Charles étant ici l’alter ego de Paul). Depuis, il y a eu Nick’s Movie (Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders, 1979), Journal intime (Moretti, 1983), Les derniers mots (Van der Keuken, 1998), Le fil de ma vie (Lionel Legros, 2002), L’insaisissable image (Hanoun, 2007). L’origine de cette complainte de la maladie se trouvait peut-être en fait dans Violence et passion (Visconti, 1975) et à travers l’œuvre de Dwoskin. Le cinéaste cherche à ne pas mourir pour pouvoir finir son film.

On m’opposera que tout était déjà dans le journal de Charles Vecchiali. Paul n’a pas eu grand-chose à faire. Peut-être. Mais c’est le résultat qui compte, peu importe d’où il provient. Il fallait beaucoup de tact, de sensibilité, pour traduire ce journal en film sans le trahir.

Et Maladie recoupe tout un cinéma moderne, fait sur l’écrit et la parole, qui est celui de Bresson et de Straub.

Luc Moullet


1. Dans ce contexte objectif, les très rares adjectifs qui mentionnent la douleur prennent une importance considérable.
2. Vecchiali, de façon discutable, nous trompe un instant : nous croyons avoir affaire à une photo du docteur, alors qu’il s’agit de Charles.
3. Lequel est vraiment le film jumeau : il débute précisément par des photos de famille.






a partir daqui, via Bruno Andrade. Obrigada!

INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE.

SAN FRANCISCO 1968

DIRECTED BY ANTHONY STERN
MUSIC BY PINK FLOYD



parte 1

( pedimos desculpa por publicar este vídeo com a pobre qualidade com que, infelizmente, se encontra disponível no youtube.
aconselha-se a que, por todas as suas qualidades particulares, procurem vê-lo com a melhor definição e som possíveis.)







+ para ver
San Francisco Redux: No. 1 (2008)
(Directed by Sadia Sadia, Anthony Stern, Stephen W. Tayler
UK:8 min)




+ para ler

For Anthony Stern, For Life
BY NICOLE BRENEZ
text in www.anthonysternglass.com. January 2009

The filmic work of Anthony Stern derives from a radical energy that reveals for us, in figural terms, the life-drive. In 1968, San Francisco, a masterpiece of psychedelic cinesthesia, explodes cinema, seeking a liberation not only of every sense but also of representation itself – which no longer seems indexed to what is recorded, but connected directly, organically, to the energy of history. How could this have happened? How can Stern’s films, following in the steps of Peter Whitehead, crystallise these precious moments of Western history, the apogee of the counter-culture and the joyous echoes of a Romantic revolution which was then still imaginable, with such justness, pertinence and ‘breath’?


To achieve such a laying-bare of the drive, such direct contact with the origin of desire and the image, obviously requires the highest level of poetic, musical and visual culture to support scopic instinct and historical intuition. This is exactly how Schelling defined intellectual intuition, the ‘mysterious and marvellous faculty of being able to withdraw into the most intimate part of ourselves, beyond all alteration that time brings’, so that ‘it is no longer we who live in time, but time – or rather, replacing time, pure absolute eternity – which is in us’. But Stern’s filmic work elaborates the exact opposite, which thus can be called material intuition: a continual, projective, almost pyrotechnical deployment of intimacy in time, which remodels our conceptions of the instant, the present, the immediate, of speed and history. San Francisco or Wheel concretise and sculpt time or rather the here-and-now, which Stern treats as it were a woman’s body whose every dancing vibration he must follow, whose least clearly outlined movement he must seize. Our life is woven from desires that are sometimes unbound, sometimes terrible, sometimes pathetic, in an unstoppable maelstrom of which Wheel – an intimate, multiple, noisy diary of 1969 – offers an amazing pill-pop, rather like a scientific ‘section’ of the complexity of our affects. Because it proceeds from deep intimacy rather than a priori certainty about things, because it knows that cinema, irremediably, cannot register every vibration (even the most negligible) of the instant, because there is too much to feel and describe in the universe, Stern’s cinema – seemingly asphyxiated by the world’s prodigiousness – adopts the discontinuous, the optical flash, permanent intermittence, the shaky, chopped and blurred, creating a vertiginous ‘cinetic’ compression which is far more faithful to the entwined stratigraphy of the sensible realm than a continuous contemplation of appearances.

Thus issued from an organic breath that is transposed by a magisterial savoir-faire on the levels of shooting and editing, an uncommon sense of rhythm dynamises Stern’s films – for example, Serendipity (1971), a serial documentary on contemporary English architecture, The Noon Gun (2004), a reworking of footage shot in Afghanistan in 1971 – and thus the record of a civilisation which has since largely disappeared – or Havana Jazz (2006).

On reseeing or discovering such radical energy – dead drunk, yet what lucid, translucent, sometimes ironic inebriation! – we ask ourselves a crucial question: where is the cinema of today going to get this kind of energy? In fact, we can keep drawing it from Stern himself. Having achieved fame, long ago now, as a master glass-blower, the maker of Baby Baby (1965) combines his know-how in the areas of poetic documentary and recycling (his 1974 Ain’t Misbehavin’ offers a precious panorama of cinema’s representations of women) with his mastery of glass, conjuring new chromatic, sensual and political marvels. With his collaborators Sadia Sadia and Stephen W. Tayler, he has taken apart that most carnal moment of San Francisco in 1968, reinterpreted it and placed it in historical perspective, thanks to a soundtrack that mixes emblematic political sound-grabs and speeches from the period with an original score. San Francisco Redux (2008) seems suddenly like a documentary on the affective sensuality of a shared memory. Anthony Stern’s festive vindications are as indispensable, as vital as those of Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice de Vlaminck, Herbert Marcuse or his mentor, Peter Whitehead. Stern has seized the bewitching phantoms of time and turned them into celluloid-children who establish, intensify, revive and set loose our collective history.